What is the meaning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement?
Today you die. No one pronounces that horrible sentence on Yom Kippur, but it is true. Yom Kippur reenacts death. We wear white, like the shrouds we will one day be buried in. We do not eat, wash, procreate; we are as corpses. We recite the U’netaneh tokef prayer, filled with graphic, even gruesome images about our death. Remarkably, Yom Kippur is also a day filled with images of love. On this day, you learn to love. God will care for us, gather us up, listen to us, love us. We stand together, we weep with the force of reconciliation. We pound our hearts, as though we were once again trying to get them to beat. We are resuscitated to love. Yom Kippur ultimately is about two lessons, one of eternity and one of fidelity. The lesson of death is clear. We live as if we have forever. Day by day, time dribbles through our fingers. Yom Kippur seeks to make our own death real to us, so that we will, in the words of the tradition, “use each moment wisely.” If we can believe–not intellectually,
